This was an interesting article because of the way the analysis was structured, with an emphasis on Altmetrics rather than traditional bibliometrics. However the “control” papers, the un-retracted ones from the same issues, were randomly selected and, as such, might have been less newsworthy to start with.  

I don’t think that was the most interesting part though. What was interesting was that popular papers, that were retracted, got more attention than their retraction notice, and that retraction seemed to increase reference to the original article. That is worrying since it seems to imply a lack of rigour when media and social media cite studies.  

Some researchers might think that this non-traditional citation (Altmetrics) is less important than getting cited in the academic literature, but I think if we are going to see our research having real impact then it is every bit as important – how are people meant to know what is going on in those Ivory Towers unless we tell them? Altmetrics is (as with any metric) flawed, and in this case it does generally miss NZ media. It is still a reasonable measure of media and social media attention. I was interested that an Altmetrics score greater than 20 (in this article) was taken as a flag that the paper was popular - that’s an astonishingly low bar. When you think about it that speaks pretty poorly to how much interest academic publishing really generates.

Traditional publishing is straining to keep up with the mass of research outputs, it is incredibly hard to find definitive statistics but estimates run at about 2 million articles per year. The pressure on academics to publish is huge, and the time taken for peer review means that many top journals struggle with massive backlogs. For example, the highly reputable journal The Review of Higher Education, suspended all submissions in 2018 as it worked through a 2-year backlog. It is accepting submissions again now. I do wonder if we are seeing more retraction as a result of the “publish or perish” ethos. I think there is a bigger story here that we (as academic institutions) need to be more accepting of other forms of impact than simply citation rates (impact on policy, for example, or economic transformation).